Obamacare and jobs: CBO adds fuel to fire

The Republicans just got a big gift from the Congressional Budget Office: It’s going to be a lot easier for them to call Obamacare a “job killer.”

That’s because the budget office’s new economic report, released Tuesday, says the health care law will cause Americans to work fewer hours — enough to be the equivalent of 2 million fewer jobs in 2017.

There’s a lot more fine print about what those numbers really mean, and whether the jobs were “lost.” In fact, CBO said it’s in large part about the number of hours people choose to work, not actual job losses.

But what matters politically is how the numbers look in attack ads. And in this election year, “2 million lost jobs” is a Republican ad-maker’s dream.

The projection will put the White House, and especially red-state Democrats, in an even more awkward position heading into November. Until now, they’ve mostly had to worry about stories of canceled health plans and, of course, the botched website rollout. Now they’ll need to figure out how to counter, or at least explain, the new CBO job figures.

The White House is already taking a crack at it. The report doesn’t actually say businesses will be forced to reduce employment, said the administration, which noted that the report also states there is “no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased” because of the Affordable Care Act.

Instead, the administration said Tuesday, the health care law will allow people to choose to work less because they’ll be able to get health insurance.

Under Obamacare, “individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods, like retiring on time rather than working into their elderly years or choosing to spend more time with their families,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.

“It’s only a GOP talking point if you fail to point out the facts,” said Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. “The report is saying [the Affordable Care Act] reduces job lock. To portray these as lost jobs or anything like that would be inaccurate.” Job lock is when people feel they have to stay in a job for the health benefits.

Still, Republicans wasted no time blasting out multiple emails and statements about job loss, “pink slips” and the new CBO estimates. House Speaker John Boehner’s office gave reporters a quick heads-up, and other Republicans piled on fast.

“For years, Republicans have said that the president’s health care law creates uncertainty for small businesses, hurts take-home pay, and makes it harder to invest in new workers,” Boehner, of Ohio, said in a statement. “The middle class is getting squeezed in this economy, and this CBO report confirms that Obamacare is making it worse.”

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California declared that the new report “undercuts any claim by the president that his policies are helping to expand middle-class opportunity and growth — it’s doing the exact opposite.”

And in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called the job numbers “not surprising,” adding, “The tragedy is once again you’ve got an estimate from CBO that, when all’s said and done, we still have 30 million uninsured.”

The news quickly overshadowed two other important updates about how the law is doing. The budget office lowered its estimates of first-year enrollment in Obamacare’s health exchanges to 6 million, down from the 7 million it had predicted before. That’s a drop, but it’s not the cataclysm many had expected during the worst early months of the website debacle.